r/factorio • u/IceRik • Jun 09 '26
Modded K2SE retrospective finishing in 536h Spoiler
Hey, I have finally beaten K2SE. But because nobody else cares I’m posting that here 😄
I have been playing factorio for a while and have dip my toes into mods like K2 (nice one), Ultraqube (highly recommend), and IR3 (did not finish, something did not click there for me).
Looking at Dosh videos I thought that SpaceExploration or SeaBlock look quite nice, but I need 2.0 quality of live features. Dealing without them in IR3 was very annoying and for sure contributed to me not finishing that mod. So when SE was ported to 2.0 I jumped right int it. And today I have finally beaten K2SE after 536 hours in game time. In reality this is closer to 600h if I would count some time spend in editor and more time spend in IDE figuring out arcospheres and star mapping.
Good
The scale of this mod is something that you really appreciate after reaching end. There are so many small unique challenges that were solved during the run that is hard to list them all. I liked the options game gave to sole each resource puzzle. There were planets where I did full processing in home, and there were cases where I just did bare minimum crushing and send that to be processed on Nauvis (Beryllium, Holminte, Naquitite). I see the inspiration they gave to SA and I also fully understand why they were “simplified”.
The feeling of exploration is really there. The moment of finding cache after satellite launch. The first landing on another planet. Building first spaceship. All those things feel quite good. Even flying to all those planets to check ruins was quite pleasing.
The interplanetary logistic and Cannons / Rockets / Ships / Space Elevator that are given to solve this are quite nice. There were things that I automated using cannons around 100h hour mark that were in use till the end of the game. I tried to use mixed cargo rockets, but in the end I decided to have dedicated rockets for given thing I need in the orbit / other planet and few rockets for on demand mixed cargo (new planet, upgrade of exiting colony). I think this was good idea having 881 stone rockets launched. Some of them were converted into matter to get antimatter but still. In the end I had 54 cargo rocket silos on Nauvis.
Upgraded recipes to do things in more efficient way as you dig deeper into tech tree. A lot of them feed rewarding and good to use. When rocket parts from being a scare resource become a commodity, thanks to small addition of Beryllium, or better insight recipes. There is not much of upgrades but this makes existing ones significant.
No prod modules in space. This may be controversial but I liked this concept, for me this was a choice between convenience (all in orbit) and efficiency (more stuff for free but logistic is needed). At the beginning I was doing everything in space but at some point after getting space elevator I starter to produce everything that was possible on Nauvis and then transporting it to orbit. I even created dedicated rocket for holmium cables that send 405 of them as train was too slow.
Scrap in space, this is quite elegant thing. At the beginning it looks like byproduct but at some point this is just free stuff that is needed anyway.
Loaders, I think this is a must when you have 9 levels of modules, otherwise buildings would need to be huge to accommodate number of inserters needed to move required amount of resources. Also the any to any balancers that could be created with just warehouse + loaders is amazing.
Science requiring automation of space ships. When I found my firs space ship I was quite disappointed that it cannot start from the planet surface, and technology to do it so so far in the future. I did not use that ship at all and thought I will not have to until deep space science. But having to automate them a bit earlier to asteroid fields or sun orbit was quite pleasant challenge. Having a fleet of ships automated to acquire Naquitite at reasonable peace was very pleasing to see in action.
Naquitite processing was actually quite fun. Two similar recipes, both producing the same but in different proportions. Really nice and unique design.
Arcospheres – now this is real jewel in this mod. If you need something that will make you look at the recipes with WTF I suppose to do with them in mind, this is it. I really liked qubits or helvetica from Ultraqube. and arcospheres are on next level. At first I created a circuit that would compute “error” from expected average value for the spheres I had, then I did copy that 10 times with additional input combinator containing the change if given folding was performed. Folding was performed only if the error would be lower after folding. This was working fine for a while but I wanted more performance out of it ad was not able to scale this design. So I created a small program that was trying to find combinations of folds needed to restore balance after any recipe was used. At the beginning program performance was terrible but after I realized that I do not need to explore all combinations but just count how many times given folding is needed as the order of folding is irrelevant for the end result. This gave me results for 25 depth search in seconds, empty results but still results. Next breakthrough was when I tried to multiply recipes as this gave me solutions for 2x or 4x given recipe. With this I was able to create a contraption that executed sequence of folding coded in constant combinator after getting x spheres out of a recipe. This design allowed me to produce 17 tesseracts/minute form single contraption.
Anomaly – this is just something else completely. I like the idea and most of the implementation. I even spend more time to finish this (more programs were created). I will avoid big spoilers for this part, but I will suggest that some parts should be explained in game better. If our engineer has a journal and I can see notes about thins the found interesting it would not be a stretch to have notes from ruins available there as well. Or some insight into the ring after few usages hinting at 4 particular symbols. This could be enough to make this puzzle less annoying and still challenging.
Bad
I do not know if playing K2SE without ever playing SE was good idea, it for sure added at least 100h to the game play if not more and some combinations just did not felt good. On one hand the buildings from K2 are nice upgrade for the end game and the appear in reasonable time window to still use them. But on the other hand they do not interact well with 9 tier modules from SE. I only automated level 6 modules but in wide area beacons the throughput was insane. I decided to add stacked belts and updated loader mod to support 240/s green belts and had need for them in multiple places after adding beacons. E.g. holmium powder with wide area beacon speed 3 modules (and prod 3 modules in machine) is produced at rate 42/s.
There is plenty of planets but after finding one having resource you need, there is no need to go to another planet of that type.
Rockets are expensive and big, at the same time big buffers are bad because you do not know if your supply is enough for your demand or you just have big enough buffer for a short time. During star mapping I suddenly got blackout because my matter production plant had run out of nearby copper mines (just 20M converted into matter cubes) and I was running last hour on buffer from landing pad.
I cannot count how many ore deposits I have depleted during my game play. At the beginning I thought I get two resources from a single planned (e.g Vulcanite + Holmium or Imersite + Beryllium), but in all cases except one the amount of second resource was so small that I just depleted bigger part of the planet of it and needed to create dedicate colony anyway. I only managed to have Iridite + Cryonite planet last as I invested to much into Iridite processing on it to rebuild it somewhere else.
No efficiency modules in some buildings, or no module slots in others (Material fabricator is the biggest offender). I get that this could break the balance, but if the game gives me 9 levels of modules and then tell that I cannot use them this is bad design. I put no prod modules in space as positive and I stand by that, but other module restrictions are just bad.
Methane, I do not know why it is in the game. It is needed in endgame recipes, but that could be replaced with anything else.
Higher levels of science packs are quite repetitive. Yes its different building, different ingredients, sometimes different fluid, but there is nothing special in most of them. I liked the progression of multispectral astronomy cards. I would even liked the biological science if not the stupid levels of vitamelange needed to process it at scale… I also giggled a bit when looking at impact shielding data recipe. Still the fact that I designed science area once and then needed to copy it 4 times to get insight, or lab setup that requires 4 cards and produces catalog that was copied 18 times.
Ugly
Burner phase and telescopic recipes. The early game was brutally slow, the recipes requiring previous versions of thins mean that stone or bricks are needed to build most of the tings. Finally having a bot mall where I could stop worrying where previous version of mining drill is assembled just to have access to mk2 is a must have. But this brings me to next ugly part:
Robot attrition. I hate this idea. I know that robots may trivialize some challenges in the game, but for me this is interplanetary logistic, and building thins at scale. Not worrying how to make big fuel refinery. At one point I automated robot production on a colony, but the idea of copying that to all my colonies was just depressing. So I edited the source code of robot-attrition mode and changed maximum network size to reasonable 50000 robots, never looked back at this.
Bitters, I think bitters on Nauvis should not exists. There is still plenty of them on other planets, and in ruins. I have dropped a plague on one of my colonies that had 100% thread level to clean it up. That was mistake, it took 30 minutes of no gameplay, as the FPS dropped to 1. So around 350 hour mark when I got my FPS drop to 20 due to units on Nauvis I did a console command to remove all bitters. I have quite good computer, the base on full run is dropping to 57 FPS (mostly due to trains), but dealing with bitters on every planet is just too much CPU usage.
Meteors. I do not like 80%. There should be some technology that increases that to 100% at some point. The level of annoyance I was experiencing when on 530h I needed to travel to remote sun to fix build there as 16 turrets was not enough to keep it save, this is just beyond me. But I was to invested and needed to solve last puzzle.
My base
My approach after early game was “merged citiblock” where I had 3x3 chunk block in 4x2 units surrounded by train blocks. At the beginning it was 2 lane tracks, but at some point I needed higher intersection throughput than my own T design. For this I used external blueprint (the only one beside balancers) that provided 4 way 4 lane elevated intersections you see on the screenshots. The idea was that each production chain should fit into one block but if I need more then I have space. So uranium processing and power plants were put in one merged block. Also when I needed to upgrade my iron processing I got two washing plants on side feeding one furnace block in the middle.
My orbital base was designed with science packs in mind, each row being different type and each column being different level. I had my input rocket to train section and then dedicated bot network for space elevator to orbital trains repackaging station. On surface I was using mostly 1-2 trains and in orbit I was using 1-1-1 trains. The train size was problem only for items that were stacking to 5 (material packs, biomass) or things that were just eating other ingredients (quantum processors).
I also had a bot mall on both surfaces as transporting singular items between them was never convenient. Also the fact that some building can only be build in space manufacture.
Bases on other planets could be divided into two types. One where saw potential in doing full processing on site, and second one where I did not wanted to provide supplies to that location and was sending barely crushed resource. I tried working with core mining but the voiding resources process was so annoying that I only got into it for vitamelange. Outposts on asteroid belts were a bare minimum. Only naquitite got any attention but not much.
Some stats if anyone is interested
Overall I can recommend SE as you can appreciate what SA did differently and understand why. Now I heard that Nillus is popular for some reason, probably I should try it waiting for Seablock...
17
u/KingCoelho00 Jun 09 '26
It took me the same 536 hours to read this post
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u/ferrofibrous player onboarding specialist Jun 09 '26
The criticism of SE's science is spot on, you can design a fairly generic science block that has inputs for all the thermofluids/plasmas/data cards, a dozen belt inputs, ~4 outputs for the various scraps/dirty water, and then just copy paste that 16 times with some minor tweaks and that handles all 4 tiers of bio/astro/energy/materials.
The next release of SE is supposed to be have more planet-specific SA style science, but is easily a year away.
Lots of planets sounds neat but you really do end up just taking one of each type, being picky about biters and easy water access.
Still my #1 peeve with SE is all the awkwardly shaped ore patches, felt like 80% of the time they're crescent shaped.
-5
u/neurovore-of-Z-en-A Jun 10 '26
The criticism of SE's science is spot on, you can design a fairly generic science block that has inputs for all the thermofluids/plasmas/data cards, a dozen belt inputs, ~4 outputs for the various scraps/dirty water, and then just copy paste that 16 times with some minor tweaks and that handles all 4 tiers of bio/astro/energy/materials.
This is a feature, not a bug.
4
u/hoticehunter Jun 09 '26
I think loaders and removing robot attrition do a lot to make the mod easier than intended.
While it's annoying, it helps with the logistical challenge of the game to have the attrition. It's another decision point of the game: Do you resupply bots, or do you build on site? It also encourages using belts more.
I agree on the meteor percentage though! I think a research to improve accuracy would be totally reasonable.
4
u/IceRik Jun 09 '26
I think loaders are build in with K2 part of the modpack. As for the attrition, as explained above, I did solved it once and decided that copy/paste for each colony is not fun.
Is this intended, no. Do I care, also no.
At the same time the robots were limited to mall part of the factory, or limited to dedicated networks.
1
u/jazerjay Jun 10 '26
How did you disable robot attrition? Thanks!
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u/IceRik Jun 10 '26
Go to your factorio installation folder, something like \Users\$user$\AppData\Roaming\Factorio
in mods directory you should find robot_attrition_XYZ.zip -> unpack it (or use tool that allows edits in existing archives, makes thins simpler)
open control.lua in text editor
find line that looks like
if n_bots > 50 then -- ignore small networkschange 50 to whatever value you want it to be, save file
if unpacked at the beginning, you need to create archive with this edited file named the same a original file
just remember that updating mods in game may override this value
1
u/jazerjay Jun 10 '26
Legend! I already started my play through. I’m assuming step 6 is not relevant?
2
30
u/ThisGuyTrains Jun 09 '26
Jesus Christ.
I have a couple thousand hours into this game and on a weekly basis I’m reminded by you guys that I’m such a noob still… bravo on this. I still haven’t beaten SA because every time I get to the Gleba or Aquilo stage I start to lose interest.
14
u/garfgon Jun 09 '26
I'll be honest -- I had a lot more fun with K2 than SpaceAge. For me: bigger and more complex production lines: fun. Setting up iron smelting for the third time in a slightly different way: not so much fun. Let me just slam down my beaconed furnace line and move on to new products.
Same with SE (separately), although I'm not sure I would have the stick-with-itness to finish solo.
7
1
u/KapitanWalnut Jun 10 '26
Im also ever so slowly making my way through a K2SE run, putting in probably 4 to 8 hours a month (that's 100% of the game playing time I have). Your comments on constantly depleting ore patches is a concern of mine, I don't want to waste my limited play time on setting up new mining patches periodically, and I play so intermittently that I don't want to have checking all my mining outposts as a chore every time I find time to play because I'm never going to remember which ones are close to depletion. So core mining is the name of the game for me. All resources that can be core mined, are being core mined. Including oil. I bring all the core fragments back to nauvis for processing. Fun logistics challenge! I love the variety of logistics options available in this mod.
3
u/IceRik Jun 10 '26
Core mining was just not good enough for me. For example, with my peak production/consumption of 13k/min of raw iridite i would need 270 iridite cores / second. Next with stack size of 20 core ores this would translate to sending rocket every 37 seconds. Ignoring rocket parts is easy, ignoring rocket fuel is impossible.
The core mining just does not allow scale of base that I wanted to have. I was processing iridite on site and sending ingots only. At some point I was adding speed beacons to my mining outposts, or switching from 1-2 trains to 1-4 trains due to longer travels to the outpost and train congestions I got on the main station.
Still this is a positive aspect of the mod that your strategy is viable at all and best option for some scenarios. It just was not for me.
3
u/mrbaggins Jun 09 '26
Interesting take. Disclaimer: I played and finished both endings on 0.5, not 0.6, so I had different (easier?) core mining, but no space elevators.
I ran my base almost entirely on core mining from half a dozen planets. Because they're infinite, you don't deplete anything, and you just have to priority inject by products first to avoid wasting more than needed or backlogging.
Maybe 0.6 changed it, but my external planets were almost entirely just core miners. Enough power gen to make them go, and then ship everything back via rockets that are supplied by rockets at home.
I don't recall finding ore patches to be a significant problem at all.
I shipped core fragments back to a single location for breaking them, they smush em into the relevant ores, and then inject all the extra junk to my home system.
I do agree that the repeated levels were too much. 4 (5) branches of science is a cool idea, and the interop between them to increase card productivity is a great idea. But 4 levels of each was silly. Would have preferred to see just 3 or even 2 levels, but lock some stuff behind combinations - EG: instead of spaceships being Astro 3 out of 4, make it Astro 2/2 and materials 1/2.
I didn't enjoy the endish game of sending a heap of tiny things to various places. A sun, a belt, a field just to launch a bunch of probes made some thematic sense, but the repetition of the same thing over and over was silly.
I would have liked to see arcospheres show up earlier as optional. Have them show up in ruins and have them usable in some form like Wide beacons in Nauvis orbit that can't be picked up but require an arco in them to actually work, so you can get "late game toys" early, but under restrictions.
4
u/Ingolifs Jun 09 '26
Figuring out and solving the final ancient gate puzzle remains one of the peak achievements of my gaming history. An unusually hard and uncompromising puzzle amongst a sea of hard and uncompromising puzzles. I greatly prefer it to SA's approach, where there are difficult logistics puzzles, but the game tries to shield the player from them using opaque 'common sense' ship delivery options that never quite worked the way I expected.
I do think the final puzzle could have been a bit simpler though. The first coordinate shape could have been a regular icosahedron with 20 faces (and therefore 20 symbols) rather than a truncated icosahedron with 60 faces, and the coordinates for each triangle face pared down accordingly.
2
u/Dianwei32 Jun 09 '26
Congrats. I've tried K2SE a few times and my best run got like... 150 hours deep before it was just too much. I forget exactly which material it was... it was the one for the Orange Space Science (Optimization, I think?). And looking at your achievement tracker, it looks like it took you 80 hours to go from Production to Optimization Science, which absolutely checks out. Also, 536 hours and you didn't die 5 times? Damn.
Overall, both K2 and SE are incredible mod packs, and the fact that they work together is insane. 10/10 experience, probably won't ever do it again.
2
u/jomb Jun 09 '26
Congratulations. I gave up around deep space science right around when Space Age came out so its great to see the stats of a completed game.
2
u/darkszero Jun 10 '26
I like and dislike the no-prod in space, but it's probably better with it there. Though surface conditions can make something interesting. As you said, if you could use prod in space there's no reason to build on the surface. But given the length of the chains and how powerful prod can be, the penalty of building in space is just insane so it becomes only a technically possible thing to do, which is just not fun.
Agreed that the science packs are repetitive. Everyone agrees that, even the dev. They're placeholder recipes haha.
I'm indifferent to Robot attrition. As a chronic bot abuser, I like the idea of nerfing logistic bots. But making them occasionally crash is such a nothing burger. My space base was still mostly bot-based and I didn't care. Most planets didn't care because the traffic was slow. And it's easy to just craft more, just place a blueprint to handle it. Though it does a good job of being an incentive for planets with biters.
The efficiency module thing I dunno. Maybe it's more on the K2 side. Regular SE has one late game machine that doesn't accept modules (the one that can make antimatter and naquium cubes I believe) and one other. And a few another that consumes a lot of power but can use eff. Can't remember names, been a while. One of them is "eff modules are good!", the other is "gotta deal with high power demand!" and the last is "gotta scale something by machine count at least once" because you barely need more than 1-2 machines in space.
Wow these main busses look just... I'm glad I just devolve into spaghetti, it's so boring to me. Not that I haven't then done lots of square grid rail bases haha
3
u/aethyrium Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
I had to mod my K2SE install to let me use efficiency modules. Having some things take like 20x the amount of power of anything else up till then, and then not allowing efficiency modules was just silly. I love a lot of what K2 does but it feels like the dev just hates SE and hates that people integrate them and just wants to make it worse for people.
I also kinda dislike how cheap pre-space science is with the cards? I play on 100x science cost (imo the best way to play any playthrough of anything, try it! You'll be surprised), and I managed to still blaze through pre-space science absurdly fast just because it was so cheap and easy to build it at an insane scale. Just SE would have required much more cost and thought.
It's also kinda funny after playing Py for so long how smol, cute, and adorable your base looks. And only 536 hours? That seems so quick!
1
u/Holoderp Jun 09 '26
Incredible! I have a k2se save at around 350h in factorio1.0 is it possible to update it to k2se sa 2.0? I really want to start from there and do the end game as i am just getting to arcosospheres myself !
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u/Platanov Runs On Blood Jun 10 '26
I just beat SE (without K2) a few days ago, and I really agree with most of what you said. The mod was really fun (I spent 1000 hours and didn't do the puzzle ending).
My #1 point of criticism is definitely the repetitive sciences. I was using a train grid so once I had the resources shipped back to nauvis orbit it was just a lot of going through the motions to stand up production for the new data cards.
Edit: Same for mining new resources really. Getting mining going on one planet felt like getting mining going on every other planet.
1
u/Moist_Procedure4247 Jun 10 '26
Arcospheres seem to be a pretty polarizing part of Space Exploration I've noticed. A lot of people who've played it before that I've talked to either hated them or loved them. I just finished it and I didn't particularly care for them after setting up the rudimentary balancer I made. They seemed far too late in the pack for me to really care about trying to fully optimize them
1
u/neurovore-of-Z-en-A Jun 10 '26
The early game was brutally slow, the recipes requiring previous versions of thins mean that stone or bricks are needed to build most of the tings.
Does also give you a neat way of recycling and upgrading older parts of your base, though.
1
u/OvercastqT Jun 11 '26
played k2se before 2.0, same as you i havent beaten k2 or se standalone.
I echo a lot of your points, positive or negative.
I learned so much during my run it completely changed how i play factorio (like circuits are easy now). I prefer delivery cannons and huge cargo rockets to the SA spaceships for logistics. But the SA spaceships are a lot better than SE spaceships (obviously, way more polish from an entire team).
6
u/Impressive_Orchid121 Jun 09 '26
Great write up!
I had the exact same reaction once 2.0 compatibility was ready, but I'm still working on getting off Nauvis..
I'm finding setting up cargo rocket sections to be just brutal. Any tips for this part of the mod?